Sundries & Curiosities for the Adventurous. A Tribal Inquiry.

Menu

pleasant for a moment

If we follow our heart wisdom and things don’t work out as we expect, it doesn’t necessarily mean that we have made a misstep. There may be a vital lesson that we needed to learn. In fact, there is no objective way to determine if we have done the “right” thing. Our lives unfold more like meandering rivers than freeways.

Lusseyran, known as the Blind One, would personally vet each new member of his group in order to detect possible Nazi collaborators. He could read others with extraordinary accuracy and gained a reputation for being infallible. He was, however, ambivalent abut only one member that he accepted. This man betrayed him and the entire leadership a year later. Lusseyran and his comrades were arrested by the Gestapo, interrogated, and shipped to Buchenwald. After nearly dying there, he became an informal spiritual counselor to many of the men because of his inner radiance. He was one of the few to survive.

We are all blind in a way until, like Lusseyran, we learn to “look from an inner place to one further within.” It is one thing to discover this inner light, and it is another to let it guide us in our daily lives. For Lusseyran, this guidance took the form of great insight, courage, and compassion in the most demanding circumstances imaginable. Although he almost lost his life, he never lost his sight, even int eh depths of Nazi hell.

~John Prendergast

your inner circles may not always understand, encourage, or hold you close…..then what?

inquiry for today~ how are you blind? where will you fit in loving-kindness practice?

As your practice of the immeasurables matures, the level of energy generated by the practice transforms patterns at the level of awareness. In equanimity practice, the object of attention becomes the reactive process associated with the arising of experience itself. The ordinary reactions to perception- attraction, aversion, or indifference- are transformed, and you rest in composure. Loving-kindness practice brings attention to how you select objects of perception to avoid opening to what is arising. It transforms the energy of reactive selection into open, inclusive attention, the magnanimous mind that can include everything. Compassion practice brings attention to the tendency to control what arises in experience. You do what needs to be done with complete attention.